Beppe Grillo said in a blog post that Italy spent the lira equivalent of €18 billion to rebuild after the Friuli earthquake in 1976, comparing that to what he called a “measly €50 million” set aside by the government after last week’s quake in central Italy left more than 200 people dead.

“Today they earmark a measly €50 million for a soup and a tent,” Grillo wrote, adding that for everything else the message from the government was that people should take care of themselves.

“The state doesn’t exist anymore,” he wrote.

Grillo, a comedian and political activist, co-founded the 5Star Movement in 2009. The Euroskeptic group scored a major victory in local elections in June, winning the cities of Rome and Turin.

He said the Italian state “exists solely to beg for a pittance in Europe, an overdraft that is quickly denied to us because the regions hit [by the earthquake] are not industrialized, they don’t create GDP, to sum up 13th century villages are not worth anything to the European bureaucrats.”

Graziano Delrio, the country’s infrastructure minister, said last Wednesday that “a first sum of €50 million” would be made available to deal with the immediate consequences of the earthquake, Il Corriere della Sera reported.

Italy’s Economy and Finance Minister Paola De Micheli said on the same day that the government would be “by the side of the local institutions and the citizens,” adding that Italy’s fund for national emergencies “disposed of €234 million which will be used to face immediate requirements.”

A European Commission spokeswoman said Monday the EU would consider ways of giving Italy more financial leverage to deal with the consequences of the quake, Reuters reported.

“On the basis of EU rules, there are ways of excluding [from the Italian budget] short-term costs for emergency following natural catastrophes,” the spokeswoman said, adding this “has already been done in the past in cases of earthquakes as well as other catastrophes.”